


A Midnight Smoke

by perrstein



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, a small portion of my gigantic epic about Angela, and are gonna take a billion years to briefly be together, these dramatic assholes have more chemistry than sense usually, when will I get a Mercy skin where my main girl is wearing combat boot. WHEN.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-18
Updated: 2017-09-18
Packaged: 2018-12-31 10:05:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,434
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12130116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perrstein/pseuds/perrstein
Summary: Who knew a midnight smoke break could be so stressful and dramatic?





	A Midnight Smoke

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MidwesternDuchess](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MidwesternDuchess/gifts).



> Angela joined Overwatch in her mid-20s in this, and has quite a bit of background drama going on _before_ Reyes drops more on her plate.
> 
> For @reduxroyal over on tumblr!

_"There is no sun without shadow,_

_and it is essential to know the night."_

_Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus_

 

* * *

 

 

 

Machines hummed and twisted late into the witching hour under Angela's watchful gaze. There wasn’t much that she could do at this point in the night with the rest of her staff in bed already, nothing that required her attention in the next few hours to ensure the proper results. This was the juncture that she took any unfinished reports on the clinical trials she oversaw to the infirmary; the night shift there never complained about an extra hand to sort things for the morning or extra eyes to monitor patients. Running the medical research department already left her with sixty hour work weeks, but she could afford to give a little more. 

 

With a sigh, Angela began shuffling the files from her desktop to her tablet to bring what data could be analyzed that night with her to the infirmary. She paused to rub at her eyes, grimacing against the ache from hours of rapt staring as she worked, fixed and unblinking. She half rose from her seat to leave when an instinctive shiver at the base of her neck had her eyes snapping up to her office door. A man clad in black leaned against her doorframe; he would have looked ominous, but the harsh glare of the night shift lighting still left Gabriel Reyes easily visible. 

 

If any man could have been chiseled from the shadows to survive the blazing sun, Angela mused, it would have been Gabriel. He carried the shadows from his past with every step, allowing him to guide others to peace by knowing what was in the darkness. That aura he exuded didn’t exempt him from teasing from his co-workers, however, and Angela had witnessed Ana and Jesse’s unspoken contest over who could get in the most appropriate -- or inappropriate -- quips first hand.

 

“Are you quite done lurking, Gabriel?” Angela’s tone came out dry and almost amused, but her words carried a fine edge beneath the surface. “It’s not often that you seek my counsel when there’s no ongoing mission or crisis at hand.”

 

Not without Ana twisting his arm to do so, at least. 

 

His smooth chuckle was quiet, but the sound filled the room as his presence tended to do when he wasn’t in the field. Angela tried to school the expression on her face -- a glint of her eyes, a hardening around her mouth -- but he’d always had the uncanny ability to read her like a book. He watched her features shift. No detail, no matter how minute, escaped his own guarded gaze, and she tensed beneath his scrutiny. He always knew more than he should, knew more about  _ her  _ than he should, but that couldn’t be helped when his position was essentially spymaster and commander of a shadow group. Which meant this visit wasn’t very likely to be there about a health concern.

 

“Come take a smoke break with me, Ange. You’ve been in here long enough.” Gabriel said. There wasn’t a hint of command in his voice, but already he angled away to leave as if he wouldn’t tolerate any sort of argument.

 

Angela gave a short nod. “I suppose I’m past due for a break.” As she reached for her things, a sharp head shake caught her attention, made her pause.

 

“Leave your phone. Your commlink, too.”

 

She stared at him, her hand held frozen over the pocket she had dropped her cell phone into. Gabriel kept his gaze steady, a silent battle of will between two titans in their fields. The moment only broke when Gabriel stepped into her space, dropping his own communication devices on the top of her desk. A gesture to build faith then, Angela decided, while watching him turn and walk back out of her door. It was more than she could say about Jack or Ana most days.

 

Tugging her phone back out of the pocket of her slacks, she dropped everything into a desk drawer and locked it. Shucking her lab coat and rising from her chair, she followed Gabriel, just as she’d follow him almost anywhere. Together, they wound through the emptied halls of the base, nodding to the one-off skeleton shift members of the security unit. Angela knew the two of them walking outside wouldn't attract any more attention than usual; it shouldn’t interest anyone who feeds information of on-base dynamic changes to Ana. She often took smoke breaks with Gabriel and Jesse, and had started doing so a few months after she joined Overwatch.

 

Or...she did before things with Ana went so far spectacularly south.

 

The thought of Ana put Angela back on edge. Angela trusted Gabriel, had taken lives to protect his and brought him back from the edge of death, but Ana had held his ear for far longer than Angela herself had been on either of their radars. For all that Overwatch preached being like a family, the organization was very good at leaving fringe members who didn’t agree with their strong paramilitary approach to peace feeling iced out from the camaraderie. Angela could feel her lip curling slightly -- one of her obvious tells -- only to force her expression back to inscrutable as Gabriel lead her to the base vehicles. 

 

“You coming, doc?” Gabriel must have said something before that; he was looking at her with a raised brow as he got into an unmarked truck. Trust Gabriel to look graceful even while getting into a truck, Angela mused. Heaven forbid he not carry himself with the utmost control at all times, like a fingertip poised on the crescent-moon edge of a trigger. German curses slipped past clenched teeth while Angela pulled herself into the all-terrain vehicle with less than half the grace Gabriel had achieved. She hadn’t yet managed to find a coordinated way to get into those trucks herself.

 

Without Jesse’s slow drawling chatter, the silence broadened between them as Gabriel pulled out of the lot carried the ghost of comfort, the lingering aura of extended trust waiting to be validated or executed. Angela stared out of the tinted window to pass the time, hands loosely curled around her knees. There wasn’t much to see besides the shadowed trees Gabriel drove past once they cleared the last boundary marker for the base, but it was soothing to watch them blur together. Angela glanced at him every few minutes; the comfort she felt while in his presence could only muffle her paranoia for so long.

 

“How much longer until you’re satisfied with our distance from the base?” She tried making her voice light, but he remained as stone-faced as ever.

 

“Just a little further, Angela.”

 

Dim lighting from the dashboard painted Gabriel’s cheekbones, painting stark shadows over the looks he was always so dismissive of as he turned enough to look at her without losing sight of the road. His voice was still relaxed, but that he said her full first name rang more warning bells. Charisma, it seemed, was a requirement for the leaders of Overwatch, but his was a subdued kind of charm. He soothed ruffled feathers and quieted paranoia with his unassuming airs where Jack’s poster boy style failed. Still, even Gabriel’s charm could only carry him so far in the face of her instincts.

 

She hadn’t survived as a war orphan and living chess piece for politicians for this long without trusting those instincts -- despite what others in Overwatch and the UN councils had assumed about her from just viewing her files -- and she was most certainly being toyed with here. She bristled. She watched the trees bleed together. She bit her tongue. 

 

“How was your time away?” Angela asked. She could be polite and dig for  _ other  _ information while he stalled for time. She still had no idea what he did when they weren’t on base together.

 

“Hm. It was decent. Things got shot, and for once it wasn’t McCree.” He chuckled at his own joke, and despite herself, Angela grinned as well. Being a sharpshooter didn’t seem to stop Jesse from getting shot more often than the average agent.

 

“He’s a bit hopeless sometimes, isn’t he? Usually, the infirmary pages me to deal with him when he comes back from missions.” Gabriel’s sidelong glance held a dozen questions that he would never bother to voice, and she shrugged in response. He could be ridiculous, and just as hopeless as his protege at times. 

 

“Jesse still trusts me over the rest of the infirmary staff. That’s the price of a friendship that stretches back almost nine years now, I suppose.” Angela watched Gabriel’s face soften into a thoughtful look.

 

“He trusts you more than he trusts almost anyone, Angela. I’ve only seen the boy as relieved as he was when you came onboard one other time.” Questioning eyes met his, refusal to openly voice her questions left her in the same position he had just vacated. “He only looked that relieved when he found his place with us.”

 

Angela started. “I...see.” 

 

She had known Jesse placed his trust in her, but had always attributed it to knowing each other when they were hardly more than children. The deliberately sly, searching look on Gabriel’s face let it be known he had only shared that knowledge to leave her flat-footed, and she was inclined to let him win that round. The conversation lapsed once as she looked away from his all-seeing gaze; a fire burned under her skin at the thought of him knowing the secrets buried between herself and Jesse McCree, of him thinking about her in the same way. She didn’t mind the heat. The tension building between them carried a different weight now, but she couldn’t let that distract her any longer. 

 

Her jaw twitched when she realized she hadn’t gotten the answer she had wanted, and instead walked herself into a trap, and not even the first one of the night.

 

Minutes later the truck finally began to slow, and her gaze sharply turned from the window back to Gabriel’s face. There didn’t seem to be any sort of marker when he finally pulled over on that stretch of woods lined road, but Angela still eyed the area with suspicion, seeking any sign of surveillance but finding none. She wouldn’t be surprised if he had this spot under guard over the past few months. It seemed like nothing could slip undetected past his knowing eyes, even though he had just gotten back to this base two nights ago. For the sake of speeding his paranoid flair for the dramatics along, she didn’t hesitate to follow him.

 

“Stay close, doc. This isn’t the place to be alone in the dark.”

 

“Gabriel,” Angela drawled, accent heavy as sarcasm dripped from every word, “you always bring girls to the nicest places.”   
  
Gabriel only looked over his shoulder once, briefly giving away that he was smiling at her snark, to check if she was following before walking entirely off the side of the road into the trees. That feeling of dread was slowly building as she trailed after him, accompanied only by her gratefulness that she was wearing her usual combat boots since her favorite lab heels had broken when Reinhardt had accidentally stepped on her foot while spinning her around in a dance the night before. 

 

Even then, it was difficult to keep up as Gabriel moved through the darkness without using a flashlight. She had to ask how he was so comfortable with this kind of travel, provided he wasn’t doing something ridiculous like bringing her all the way out here just to inform her of her pending removal from Overwatch to prevent a scene on base. For a split second, she wondered if this was something Ana had put him up to, before sharply dismissing the idea. Ana would do many things, but deliberately put Overwatch in a worse position for the sake of a petty grudge wasn’t one of them.

 

As Angela’s eyes adjusted further to the darkness, her hand hovered by her hip, wishing for the comfort of her pistol. This  _ felt  _ like an ambush, and she would hate to have survived her parents’ sacrifice only to die to one incredibly handsome American in the middle of unseasonably warm German woods. Like most members of Overwatch, she didn’t carry her field weapon on her unless she was loading out to a combat mission. Carrying her pistol was an uncomfortable reminder that some lives had to be ended in order to save lives, that a well-aimed bullet could do more damage than her scalpel could ever undo. Even if Gabriel wasn’t leading her into a difficult situation for them both, the darkness pressed in on all sides like a wine-dark tide, like a tinted lens, exposing her to the night without any defense at hand.

 

Hospitals and labs all had clear lighting, after all. Even when running on emergency generators, she was always in the light, and that had kept the darkness in her life at bay for years.

 

Finally, Gabriel came to a stop in a slight clearing. The suddenness left her stumbling into him. He turned to face her, and his brows raised when he took her body language in. “Easy there, kid. I’m not luring you to your death.” 

 

“You sure have a funny way of showing that, Reyes.” Angela could feel his laughter shaking his chest under her palms as she pushed off of him. She couldn’t take the distraction of being pressed against him while  _ something  _ was clearly going to change her life tonight.

 

“Ooo, you broke out the last name. I’m  _ quaking  _ in my boots, Ziegler.” Gabriel’s said, mirth falling away as he shifted in place. Angela might even call him  _ nervous _ , of all things.

 

The heavy knot in Angela’s chest felt as if it was slowly unraveling. Gabriel was never one to lie to her, he would refuse to say anything at all instead. He was too close, she had to look up to make eye contact, but she felt safe and made no move to back away another step. Gabriel seemed torn between staying professional or reaching out to her, a hand hovering between them before finally curling under her elbow. Angela relaxed by inches as the scent of his cologne and the forest washed over her, only for his next words to knock the breath right back out of her as she stared at him in absolute horror.

 

“I’m here to ask you to help me bring Overwatch down.” 

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> dun dun DUN
> 
> Hi, I love this AU and these dramatic shits and also what happens immediately after where this ends.
> 
> If you like what I do, feel free to pop on over to my blog (barddog.tumblr.com) or twitter (@bard_dog)!


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